Democracy and despotism of the majority

As political predictions go
it took a good deal longer to unfold than he may have expected, but it rings a
great deal truer than much of the pundtitry of our time.

Have we at last entered an
age when our masters can in fact do that which we were warned to fear most –
those who can destroy not only the body but also the soul, and I’m not
referring to the speculations of Donald Tusk about the eternal
destiny of his adversaries in the Battle of Brexit. It is a fearful
prospect.

Fetters and headsmen
were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the
civilization of our age has refined the arts of despotism… The excesses of
monarchical power had devised a variety of physical means of oppression: the
democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair
of the mind…

Under the absolute
sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul,
and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior
to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic
republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

These were words written
nearly 200 years ago. They described an anticipated tyranny whose seed was seen
in the very structure of the evolving democracy of the United States of
America. For a number of reasons – geographical, institutional and cultural –
that seed did not germinate or flower in the lifetime of the author of those
words. Nor did it flower in the lifetime of many of the subsequent generations
– until now.

In the past several
decades, with the shrinking of the world and the spread of democracy, what Alexis de
Tocqueville feared might happen to the fledgling democratic polity of the
United States is now to be feared across much of the globe. Indeed it may no
longer be just a fear. It may be our lived experience.

This lived experience is
already a reality in the United States and is preoccupying any number of
thinkers in that country who are contemplating the unfolding of many of the
dangers feared by de Tocqueville. Among them are Yuval Levin in The
Fractured Republic, and Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018). On this side of
the Atlantic, Douglas Murray engaged with the same issues in The
Strange Death of Europe.

In Levin’s view the late
1960s and the bulk of the 1970s constituted the darkest, most ominous time in
America’s post-war path-—it was the moment when we could no longer deny that
something fundamental was changing and that, in some profound way, America
seemed to be coming apart under the pressure of “the forces of individualism,
decentralization, deconsolidation, fracture, and diffusion.”

Levin
is not a pessimist. Neither is Deneen, who argues that the flawed foundations
of liberalism have led us into a dangerous cul de sac. This
unsustainable politics has provoked a reaction which has brought us into a
culture war – bordering on a “cold” civil war – which is going to get worse
before it gets better. Both see a hard time ahead.

What
is truly remarkable is that de Tocqueville foresaw this nearly two centuries
ago, foresaw it happening at the moment which mankind abandoned that
understanding of itself which identified human solidarity as the key to a
politics of peace and prosperity. While he was fascinated by the great good he
saw in the democratic politics of America in the 1830s, it did not blind him to
a certain paradox he perceived in the system.

De Tocqueville, grappling
with that paradox, wrote in Democracy
in America that he held it to be “an impious and an execrable maxim
that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatsoever it pleases”, even
though he still asserted that all authority resides in the will of the
majority. What de Tocqueville feared – and what we now have stalking the body
politic of numerous nations across the world – was the tyranny which the
apparently simple and benign concept of majority rule seemed to forebode.

We now identify these as populist movements – and they occupy all
sectors of the political spectrum, all equally threatening to our freedoms.
What do they all have in common? They are movements riding, with passionate
intensity, on waves of emotion and prejudice. They have abandoned the
principles of justice and have replaced them with the principles of power and
majority rule. They simply neither accept nor recognise that majority rule is
no more than a technique by which we organise government, not a principle of
justice. They are technocrats, not democrats. They are those who consider
themselves not to be populists but to be “on the right side of history” while
their opponents are the populists.

De Tocqueville saw it this way:

A general law—which
bears the name of Justice—has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority
of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every
people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just.

When I refuse to obey
an unjust law, I do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding,
but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of
mankind. It has been asserted that a people can never entirely outstep the
boundaries of justice and of reason in those affairs which are more peculiarly
its own, and that consequently, full power may fearlessly be given to the majority
by which it is represented. But this language is that of a slave.

Majority rule is a dangerous Leviathan
in a society where relativism has resulted in Justice being denied as a
universal principle. For that reason he is of the opinion that while in practical terms one
social power must always be made to predominate over the others, liberty is
endangered when the vehemence of this power is unchecked because it is the
inalienable will of the people.

Unlimited power is in
itself a bad and dangerous thing; human beings are not competent to exercise it
with discretion, and God alone can be omnipotent, because His wisdom and His
justice are always equal to His power. But no power upon earth is so worthy of
honor for itself, or of reverential obedience to the rights which it
represents, that I would consent to admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant
authority. When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are
conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a
monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny…

But it is his observations
on the power of public opinion, in league with the tyrannies he foresees, that
he most prescient and worrying.

Even in his day he saw
public opinion in the United States as being far more influential than in
Europe. In America, he argues, “as long as the majority is still
undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably
pronounced, a submissive silence is observed, and the friends, as well as the
opponents, of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.”

I know no country in
which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as
in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and
political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad… But in a nation where
democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there
is but one sole authority, one single element of strength and of success, with
nothing beyond it.

Is he exaggerating here?
Even if he was in terms of what prevailed in his own time, it is certainly not
an exaggeration for our time. The Republic of Ireland might be taken as a
sample of what the prevailing democracy now offers the dissenter. A two thirds
electoral majority effectively legalized abortion there last year. Immediately
the defeated minority was jeered at and told by the victorious majority,
“It’s over.” Months later, a
public representative, one of those who defended to right to life of the nation’s pre-born children, was
shouted at in the street, “Ha, you lost”.

The reality is, the
dangerous reality is, that power exercised in this way, as was done by the Democratic
Party’s populist regime under the Obama administrations, produces a populist counter
response and gives us the Presidency of Donald Trump.

De Tocqueville foresaw this
kind of culture crippling freedom of thought and speech. He argues that within the barriers set by
public opinion, the opinion of the majority, an author may write whatever he
pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them.

Not that he is
exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and
persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he
has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every
sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he
published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many
others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by
his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to
speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the
daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was
tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.

He
imagines this new sovereign power, this new Leviathan, saying to its subjects,

You are free to think
differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you
possess; but if such be your determination, you are henceforth an alien among
your people… Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being, and
those who are most persuaded of your innocence will abandon you too, lest they
should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but
it is an existence comparably worse than death.”

How
real all this now seems for the defeated and politically marginalized “losers”
of Ireland’s battles for life and natural marriage? They are experiencing life
as envisaged by Adrian
Vermeule, Professor of Constitutional Law in Harvard Business School, when
he summed up in First
Things,the forms that “death” is now taking in the heart of our
liberal democracies:

Progressive
liberalism has its own cruel sacraments—especially the shaming and, where
possible, legal punishment of the intolerant or illiberal—and its own liturgy,
the Festival of Reason, the ever-repeated overcoming of the darkness of
reaction. Because the celebration of the festival essentially requires, as part
of its liturgical script, a reactionary enemy to be overcome, liberalism
ceaselessly and restlessly searches out new villains to play their assigned
part. Thus the boundaries of progressive demands for conformity are structurally unstable, fluid, and ever shifting,
not merely contingently so—there can be no lasting peace. Yesterday the frontier
was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage;
today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult
incest, or who knows what?

De Tocqueville concluded
that monarchical institutions of the past had thrown odium upon despotism. Let
us beware, he said, lest democratic republics should restore oppression, and
should render it – despotism – less odious and less degrading in the eyes of
the many, by making it still more onerous to the few.